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Garbage in, garbage out

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The conservative fantasy world, so carefully crafted with Kochwhore pocket change, has built up an alternate reality so seductive that it’s now turning on its creators. One way it manifests is with GOP denial over polling data showing Romney ina death spiral. Garbage in, garbage out, now the untreated run off is flowing like rapids, so why not make an honest buck off of it?

Disc Mag — If you believe that the polls are skewed would you be willing to bet money that the polls are skewed? Specifically, I want to wager that “unskewed polls” turn out to be further off the mark than the regular polls in reference to the final election results. I’m not 100% sure that the pollsters are correct, and I don’t know more than a superficial amount as to the weighting methodologies, but the track record of skew-skeptics is suspect enough that I think this is a way I can make money off people who I perceive to be suckers. Of course, the people who I perceive to be suckers think I’m the sucker, which is fair enough. Take my money!

Comments

The thing is that this whole poll denial-ism meme might actually help the GOP. It won’t win over independent voters, but it could help reverse flagging GOP enthusiasm. I would argue this for two reasons. First, it provides GOP supporters a way to justify continued expenditure of both time and money on the campaign. After all, if you’re losing that badly you have less and less incentive to go out and support Governor Romney or your local GOP candidate; if the race is actually perceived as being close, on the other hand, you’re incentivized to do the opposite. Second, the idea that the “liberal” media is trying to “rig” the election has a lot of resonance on the right; it pisses GOPers off, which in turn helps fire them up further.

I doubt this will turn around the Presidential race, but it will likely help compensate for the drubbing GOP races at the congressional, state, and local level are going to take from how badly the presidential contest is going. Doing that will help the GOP continue doing what they’ve been doing since 2010, and if you look at the signals coming from many of the talking heads on the right that seems to be their intention.

I’d be less willing to bet on the “official” election results than on the exit polls. There’s a consistent difference in favor of whatever candidates and propositions have the most conservative money whenever there’s a Diebold-style no-paper-trail electronic voting system. (According to conservatives, exit polls and paper ballots must, by definition, both be biased in the same direction to the same extent while corporate-run, effectively un-recountable, and entirely opaque electronic voting results must represent the real vote.)